This report was
funded independently by a grant from the Institute for Human
Rights Research located in San Antonio, Texas. All opinions
expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the author.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who
assisted me in the preparation of this study, namely the
staffs of various Congressional, State, and local offices as
well as officials from the National Park Service. Most of
all, however, this study could not have been possible without
the generous cooperation of the kind people of the Blue Ridge
mountains. I have received so much more from them than I
shall ever be able to return.

This is a
report about people; people who live near or along the Blue
Ridge Parkway National Park. The General Accounting Office,
in a December 1979 report, stated that, in general, the
Federal efforts to acquire lands for such areas as national
parks should be reassessed to include alternatives to the
most common method of acquisition, direct fee purchase. The
GAO also recommended that each individual park or area
carefully study the impact of its acquisition policy on the
local landowners, or inholders. This study attempts to
discover same of that impact with specific reference to the
Blue Ridge Parkway. The GAO report also devoted a few pages
to the Parkway, but, obviously, due to its effort to cover a
great many parks and recreational areas, could not
investigate aspects of life along this scenic motorway. It is
interesting to note that the GAO field researchers for the
section on the Blue Ridge Parkway did not talk to any
inholders. This study attempts to fill that void and, in a
sense, might be considered as a supplement to the GAO report.

A few comments
are necessary regarding terms and sources. In this report the
term "inholder" will be used in the broad sense
(not in the more narrow definition of the National Park
Service), that is, a property owner whose land adjoins, or is
significantly affected by government park land. Most of the
field research conducted in this report was confined to the
Southwestern Virginia counties of Carroll and Patrick
although a few inholders in other counties were interviewed.
In the section on Sources a few people listed will not appear
in specific endnotes following each chapter. The knowledge
gained from such sources was of a general nature.

To reiterate;
this report will focus on people; not parcels of land and
land law, not trees and rivers, not mountains and trails, but
people and how they have been affected by the land
acquisition policies of the National Park Service and,
perhaps more importantly, their perceptions and feelings as
to how land acquisition has affected their cultural heritage,
their future, and their quality of life on their land.1

The scenic motorway which
come to be known as the Blue Ridge Parkway was a product of
the Public Works Administration, a large component of the New
Deal's efforts to provide jobs to the needy unemployed of the
Great Depression by the construction of large public works
projects. In one sense, then, the Blue Ridge Parkway was a
"make-work" project designed to employ a projected
10,000 construction workers for at least two years.1

In another sense, the demand
for a paved motorway and better access through the Blue Ridge
Mountains as well as for preservation of the area for scenic
enjoyment of tourists had been around for decades. The Blue
Ridge Mountain area was, in many ways, the "last
frontier" in the continental United States. There was
virtually no electricity in the area until after World War
II. Most of the people of the Blue Ridge in the 1930's had
rarely seen a telephone or a radio. In addition to road
conditions, sanitary and educational facilities were abysmal.
In the face of such poverty, what made the Blue Ridge
Mountains the "last frontier" was the people not
the land; a people fiercely proud and independent; a people
so isolated that the appearance of the land acquisition
officers prior to the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway
was the first governmental contact for most of the
descendants of the Scotch-Irish settlers who first came to
the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their mountain
heritage had been maintained literally untouched by the
modernization which had swept through the rest of the nation.2

One of the best descriptions
of the people of the Blue Ridge comes from Richard C. Davids'
excellent history, The Man Who Moved A Mountain:

A young man and his
woman could start life with little more than a skillet
and a hoe. They would go up to the mountain where the
trees were so big there was no underbrush and where folks
said you couldn't hear a cowbell for the birds a-singin'.
Together the young couple would settle in a fern-shadowed
hollow where water was close by, deaden the trees by
cutting off a ring of bark, then hoe dawn kernels of corn
between. No need to plow the soil, it was that loose and
mellow. After harvest they had the corn ground at the
flutter mill, and in the embers of the fireplace they
baked it into johnny ashcake 3

Here, then, were a people
with an intense relationship with their land and mountains
when the first shovelful of earth was lifted out of the Blue
Ridge Mountains in September 1935 to begin the building of
the Parkway. 4

Of special interest to this
report is how the land was acquired for the Blue Ridge
Parkway, particularly within the state of Virginia. The
Parkway was to be a joint cooperative effort between the
Federal government and each-affected state with the former
funding 90% of the project. Land acquisition, however, was
left primarily to the states. Virginia used the methods of
simple fee acquisition, condemnation, and the less-than-fee
acquisition process known as scenic easements, a term which
will be discussed in greater detail later. More important for
the moment was the fact that, in their haste to acquire land
for the Parkway, the Virginia state land acquisition officers
made a false promise to the people of the Blue Ridge
Mountains. "They promised that they would get us out of
the mud," was how one local official described it. Since
the new motorway was to be the first lengthy paved road in
the area, many residents willingly sold their land with the
assurance that the Parkway would be a farm-to-market access
road for local commercial and agricultural uses as well as
for the primary recreational use. All of these promises made
by the land officials were verbal. A written document would
not have been highly regarded to the largely unlettered
mountain people, but a man's word counted for something.
During the first year of the Parkway's operation farmers were
able to drive their trucks freely along the new highway to
market. During the second year a special permit was required.
By the fourth year all commercial traffic was prohibited from
the Blue Ridge Parkway. The newly improved road promised the
farmers and citizens of the mountains had been a very
short-lived benefit, indeed. There is little documentation on
the "farm-to-market" promise about the Parkway made
during the land acquisition process in the mid-1930's. All
that one has are the statements of people who were there at
the time. This apparent deceit by several Virginia officials
not only weakened the anticipated economic revival, but it
had a profound socio-psychological effect on the communities
of the mountains. It sowed a deep seed of mistrust of
government into a people who initially welcomed the Parkway;
a mistrust which soon was transferred to the National Park
Service.5

By a 1936 Act of Congress
the administration and maintenance of the Blue Ridge Parkway
was turned over to the National Park Service within the
Department of Interior. This signified no immediate change in
top personnel since the Public Works Administrator, Harold L.
Ickes, was also the Interior Secretary. The next few years
saw the states of Virginia and North Carolina acquire
additional thousands of acres of land necessary for the
approximate 200 foot-wide swath of highway under
construction. The states then deeded over their lands to the
Federal government. Many private and public road accesses
were granted until July, 1938 when Secretary Ickes ordered
the Governors of the respective states not to allow any
further accesses to be built to the Parkway. The great
majority of today's private road crossings on the Parkway
were established and reserved for the local population prior
to that order. 6

The Blue Ridge Parkway was
an oddity within the National Park Service. Its elongated
path allowed for few National Park camping facilities
although Virginia and North Carolina established several
state parks near the Parkway. Even more unusual was the fact
that Congress never truly defined the boundary for the
Parkway. Boundaries were to be adjusted by the Park Service
when deemed appropriate. Compared to other National Park
areas with Congressionally-defined or legislative boundaries,
the Blue Ridge Parkway with its administrative boundaries
gave great power to the Park Superintendent and Interior
Secretary for the acquisition of additional lands.

In the early 1960's Park
Service officials perceived the threat of development along
the Parkway. Therefore, to accommodate this end, a 1961 Act
of Congress was passed granting the Interior Department the
following authority:

... in order to
consolidate ... the land forming each such parkway, to
adjust ownership lines, and to eliminate hazardous
crossings of and accesses to these parkways, the
Secretary... is authorized to acquire, by purchase or
exchange, land and interests in land contiguous to the
parkways.

This piece of
legislation still figures prominently in the present-day
controversy along the Parkway which will be" discussed
later. 7

It was not
until after passage of the 1965 Land and Water Conservation
Act that land acquisition along the Blue Ridge Parkway
accelerated at a greater rate than at any time since the
mid-1930's. This Act derived monies from off-shore oil leases
and other tax sources for the purchase of land by the
National Park Service, the National Forest Service, and the
National Fish and Wildlife Service and has proven to be an
enormous booty of funds for Park land expansion. The Federal
government has the authorization to acquire land until 1990
with $4 billion from the LUC Fund. Beginning in the late
1960's and throughout the 1970's the Blue Ridge Parkway
shared in this windfall of available funds specifically
earmarked for new lands. with such a plethora of money, the
primary method of land acquisition along the Parkway in the
1970's was fee simple or the direct purchase of title by the
government, putatively on a "willing seller" basis.
one method of acquiring land not used in the decade was
easements which had constituted a large part of acquisition
in the 1930's by the state of Virginia lover approximately
1,200 acres of Parkway). An easement is essentially a
contract between a landowner and the government in which the
landowner agrees to certain restrictions on his or her
property such as not cutting down a tree without permission
of the Park Service. For this specified control over part of
the land in order to maintain the Park's esthetic mandate,
the governmental agency "buys" the easement from
the landowner and the landowner retains title to the land.
Easements can be scenic, developmental, conservation-type, or
other forms, but they all hold the similar thread of being
much less costly to the government and negotiable on an
individual basis with property owner and government sitting
down as equals in a construction of contract law. Easements
are merely one form of less-than-fee (a term preferred by the
Park Service) land acquisition which includes such other
options as cooperative management, leasing, and appropriate
zoning laws. Obviously, land can also be procured by the
ultimate government power of eminent domain in the form of
straight condemnations and Declarations of Taking which have
been used very rarely along the Blue Ridge Parkway during the
last two decades.8

During the last
two years the National Park Service has been attempting to
redefine its land acquisition policy. As a part of the NPS's
revised policy presented in April of 1979, each park was
directed to prepare an individual land acquisition plan which
would identify the exact desired parcels of land and the
methods of procurement. Accordingly, in March of 1980 Blue
Ridge Parkway authorities presented a Draft Land Acquisition
Plan. Previously, there had been a draft "Master
Plan" begun in 1968, completed in 1971, but not released
to the public until 1976. This first draft of 1980 negated
the earlier "Master Plan." In fact, as of the very
writing of this report, a second Draft Land Acquisition Plan
has been prepared by the Parkway office and should be made
public at approximately the same time as this report is
completed. It is the first 1980 Draft Land Acquisition Plan,
however, that is of greater concern to this report as it was
that plan which concerned the people along the Parkway during
the field research of this study. 9

A sampling of
the opinions of the inholders and other affected people of
the Blue Ridge Parkway will be presented in the next chapter,
but it is appropriate at this time to present the general
issues of this report. most of the inholders interviewed by
the Parkway expressed deep anxiety about their future, the
future of their farms and homes, their children's future on
the land, and the future of their cultural heritage. A
special purpose of this researcher was to attempt to capture
the "feelings'' of the people along the Parkway. As is
often the case, the "perceived" reality of people
is frequently more significant to the quality of life than
the "actual'' reality. How these inholders regarded the
Park Service and what they believed its impact on their
communities were major questions for this study.